As people are increasingly utilizing a variety of computing devices, including portable devices such as tablet computers and smart phones, it can be advantageous to adapt the ways in which people interact with these devices. Users are accustomed to manually typing words into a search field to search for words in a webpage or document in order to highlight the same. Such a task is not available for printed text sources, thereby requiring users to read through or scan all text in the document in order to find or identify desired words within a document, for example.
Augmented reality (AR) and visual search applications that display a live view of a physical real-world environment augmented by computer-generated sensory input, have become more popular with adoption of smartphones and other portable computing devices. Through computer vision algorithms, some of these applications are able to provide users with information related to an environment in both a search and gaming context, thus, enabling users to interact with aspects of the environment that were previously unavailable. As technology evolves and as the features and services offered on portable computing devices evolve and expand, the ways in which word searching of printed text sources is changing.